Hastur's Bargain
by Igorina
Summary: A depressed, and down on his luck Duke of Hell suddenly finds himself accidentally invoked by a group of very disconcerting individuals.
1. Hastur and the Fangirls

Disclaimer: Good Omens is the property of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. I am merely borrowing the characters for my own nefarious fangirl purposes.

A/N: After consuming more cough medicine than is probably healthy, this little ficlet popped into my head.

Hastur plodded despondently along Brimstone Boulevard. Even the piercing screams and desperate wails of the damned were not enough to lift his foul mood. His existence really wasn't up to much at the moment. He hadn't managed any decent tempting for months, and was frequently assailed by the feeling that the rest of hell's nobility were still laughing about the answer-phone incident behind his back.

It had really all started to go downhill after Ligur's post-traumatic holy water dowsing disorder had set in nine years ago. Since then, the short squat Duke of Hell had refused to so much as set foot - or for that matter claw - outside the foetid well he was now sharing with some demi-demonic bitch going by the name of Sadako; who apparently shared his pain when it came to watery deaths. It wouldn't have been so bad if the bastard snake responsible for it all had been properly punished, but the boss's little upstart son had seen to it that the little creep had got away scot-free.

He'd tried to get on with his un-life; even going so far as to start replying to the lonely black-hearts column in the Transdimesional Times. It hadn't worked though: the Balrog turned out to have a weird fixation with hardcore flame-whip S the dementor hadn't been much of a conversationalist, and the Queen of Fairyland had just been looking for yet another way to make her estranged husband jealous.

Two exhausted looking incubi were walking towards him. They didn't even bother to bow to the senior demon. Hastur was too dispirited to even bother chastising them.

"… and then she asked me if I had any interest in classic cars," said the taller of the two sex demons.

His companion shook his head. "Think that's bad. Last man I visited asked me to wait while he put his tartan scarf on. Said that if he was going to go for role-play then he needed the ambiance to be right."

It was then that he started to feel it: the strangely prickly sensation that meant that somebody up there was invoking an infernal presence. There was not much he could do about it. If no valid 'invocation addressed to' tag was present, then hell's call centre operatives would – in an unprecedented spirit of diabolic democracy - allocate all such non-specific summonings on a completely random basis; and your average semi-skilled demonology hacker had about the same chance of getting a fully fledged Duke of Hell as they did one of the trainee imps. Still, at least it might give him the opportunity to get some real hands on temptation and corruption done.

For a several seconds everything went black.

When the nothingness dissipated, the first thing that Hastur noticed about his new surroundings were the people. In his experience, most demonologists, on having Hastur materialise in their bedroom, cellar or secret lair, tended to display either: total insanity, deranged triumph, utter terror, or a combination of all three. They did not, as a general rule, tend to react with vague disappointment and/or mild irritation. The second thing Hastur noticed about his new surroundings was the distinct lack of oversized dribbly candles, mystic amulets, grimoires bound in human skin, or any of the other paraphernalia, which one would usually associate with your average practitioner of the dark arts. There were candles present, of course; they just looked suspiciously like they'd come from the homeware department of the local garden centre.

There were a few minutes of uncomfortable silence.

"Cower brief mortals," he eventually shouted; deciding, in the absence of any original grand entrance ideas, to temporarily co-opt Azrael's best line. This did not have the intended effect. None of the fifteen people standing around the chalk circle - which appeared to be situated in the middle of a homely wooden-floored sitting room - made any move to cower in terror.

"Well, we could try again," said a petite blonde-haired woman, after a protracted pause. She really didn't look like the sort of person whom one usually found dabbling around in the deep end of the occult swimming pool.

"That'll make it the third time tonight," said a bored looking redhead. "I don't see why we couldn't have kept the incubus. He was quite good looking. And we could have asked him to wear sunglasses or something."

"It just wouldn't be the same though. I thought we were supposed to be dedicated fangirls," protested the blonde.

"Hey," said a distinctly masculine, and rather indignant, voice coming from the back of the room.

"Sorry, fangirls and one fanboy."

"Look," said the redhead. "I'm twenty-seven years old I don't think the word 'girl' is really very appropriate."

The blonde rolled her eyes. "Fine. Fan persons then. What I'm trying to say is that if we just wanted to find any old bloke with good cheekbones and designer sunglasses, then we could just go out and find one in town."

"Not in this one we couldn't," muttered the redhead.

Whilst Hastur was by no means Mensa material, he was occasionally capable of putting two and two together, and making four. "You've been trying to call up... Crawly," he said, spitting out the name.

A collective sigh emanated from the group.

"Do you know him then?" said the redhead, hopefully.

"What do you want that angel shagging bastard for?" he demanded, now utterly seething. It was bad enough being called up by a bunch of rank amateurs, but being rejected in favour of that... that... bloody snake was just too much humiliation for any self-respecting Duke of Hell to take.

"So it's true then," squealed an excitable teenage girl, who was standing precariously close to one of the sandalwood scented candles bordering the circle.

Hastur was confused. Calling another demon an angel shagging bastard/bitch/other was one of the gravest of insults one could throw about in the pit. The general murmurs of utter delight that this epithet seemed to induce amongst the assembled humans however, suggested that they were positively enamoured with the idea. _Perverts_, he thought, viciously.

"Could you get us pictures?" asked the blonde.

He was about curse the lot of them with some sort of flesh eating plague, when he spotted an opportunity. "Might be able to," he said. "Course, I'd need something in return like."

"What?" demanded the redhead; her previously impassive face suddenly the very picture of deranged fanaticism. "We'll do anything. Give you anything."

Hastur grinned horribly. "Anything? Well, in that case, I fink we can negotiate."

—

Two hours later and the formerly depressed Duke of Hell was, once again, skulking around central Pandemonium. This time however, he was humming a cheerful tune about death, despair and mutilation to himself as he did so. Fifteen souls secured for hell wasn't a poor days work, and he was going to have a great time telling Crowley that his side of the bargain involved making fifteen personal visitations, in the nude, to those – frankly very disturbing - humans. Of course, not being particularly au fait with modern technology he was rather unsure how he was going to go about obtaining the two-hour DVD of 'hot demon on angel action, with bonus twenty-minute post-coital snuggling feature, and Making Of documentary' stipulated in clause six of the contract.


	2. Hastur's Bad Day

A/N: I justcouldn't resist the urge to follow up the events of the first installment with an account of what the result of Hastur's littleforray into the world of adult entertainment would be.

"What do you mean 'it's not good enough'," demanded a glowering, and verging on homicidal Hastur, as the woman who seemed to have been allotted the role of de facto spokesperson for the group handed the DVD back to him.

"We clearly specified 'two hours of uninterrupted hot demon/angel action'."

"And that's what you bloody well got."

"Well, not exactly. What we seem to have here is 'two hours of hot demon/angel action interrupted by somebody in the background muttering about lack of proper demonic pride'."

Hastur snarled in a manner that caused a satisfying ripple of terror to sweep through the assembled humans. It had taken four days of endurance lurking in the upper branches of a venerable old oak tree outside the Wildrose Park Country House Hotel to get the footage specified in the unholy contract, not to mention the countless hours of frustration he had endured before realising that the camcorder was pointing the wrong way round, and he wasn't in any mood to put up with a bunch of tricky homo sapiens trying to wriggle out of their deal with him. He snapped his fingers, and an ancient looking piece of parchment adorned with worryingly brownish red lettering at once materialised in his hand.

"I think you'll find that if you look at the tiny words at the bottom of the page... Eh, it's not here, where fuck is it." He stared at the infernal document for a moment, looking desperately for the standard _'We reserve the right to alter the specified terms and conditions of the agreement without notice'_ sub-clause that had been a requisite feature of all immortal soul contracts for the last forty years. It was no used though, the parchment didn't even bear a basic _'Satisfaction not guaranteed'_ disclaimer.

For a few seconds there was silence as Hastur began to seethe.

This was however, very quickly followed by the shouting.

Well, to say it was shouting would be a slight understatement. The seismologists would be scratching their heads at the resulting tremors for months to come.

"The thing is," said the now trembling spokeshuman, once her hearing had partially returned. "That we want our souls back."

Hastur didn't answer. It was just too galling to concede that, due to his inability to create an armature porn movie meeting their exact specifications, hell had no legal basis on which to claim possession of their souls upon death. Instead he opted for a maximum impact departure, which involved him, and several items of nearby furniture spontaneously combusting.

"Well, at least we made copies," said one of the women, once the unpleasant smelling smoke had cleared.

"True," said the man standing next to her. "The question is, do we keep it to ourselves, share it with the rest of the fandom or put it on e-bay?"

Several hours later and an extremely pissed off Duke of Hell was storming through the Seventh Circle. This was the last time he was going to jump the queue in the legal department by getting one the work experience fiends to draft a legally binding document for him. Severing the head of the little shit responsible for the cock up had made him feel a little better, but it had done nothing to make up for the humiliation of his inability to secure a measly fifteen souls being inadvertently revealed to Dagon and Belphegor as he had raged uncontrollably at the imbecile. He knew that both of them would be standing by the blood-of-the-damned cooler in their respective departments, sniggering about it to all and sundry. It wouldn't be long before the entire population of the pit knew of his failure as a demon. Of course, what really irked him was the fact he'd been obliged to spend all that time up a tree, watching that bastard Crawly disgrace demonkind with that angel, in several novel positions, in return for nothing but the opportunity to - yet again - be the laughing stock of hell's bigwigs. It was Hastur's considered opinion, after many hours of observation, that if the little angel shagging creep was going to…well, shag angels, he could have least have insisted on being the one on top.

It was then that a deviously cunning plan began to formulate in the down on his luck Duke's mind.

Actually, by most demons' standards it was less of a deviously cunning plan, and more of a completely blindingly obvious plan. However, Hastur, whilst a lurker of the first degree, was not one for whom strategic thinking came easily. Nonetheless, it did provide a way to salvage the previous week's work.

Hastur leered smugly as he faced the two entities standing opposite him. The spot they had chosen for the meeting was located in a particularly remote area of Scotland; neither Beelzebub or the Metatron had really ever got the hang of inconspicuous, and it had been found by both sides generally best to avoid attracting too much unwarranted human attention; especially after the incident with those two FBI agents a few years ago.

"I told you it was all on there, didn't I?" he said, triumphantly.

"It wazz mozzzt dizzzturbing," buzzed Beelzebub.

"We found it a lot more than disturbing," said The Metatron, clearly of the opinion that anything hell was horrified about heaven could be horrified about better.

"But there izzz one thing Hazzztur."

"What's that?"

"We need more evidence," said The Metatron, expression ever impassive.

"More evidence?" Hastur suddenly felt very much off balance, neither Heaven nor Hell was usually that concerned with matters of absolute proof. "But there's two hours of the stuff on there."

"But ve need to make zzure of the zzituation."

"If there was more evidence then we could act."

"What sort of evidence?"

"Zze zzame zzort of thing, but maybe if one of them wazzz tied up perhapzzz."

"Or they were using feathers."

"Or if food wazz involved."

Hastur looked from the Prince of Hell to the Voice of God with something akin to absolute shock in his eyes. They were almost as bad as those bloody humans.


End file.
